Digital Threat Digest - 24 May 2022
PGI’s Digital Investigations Team brings you the Digital Threat Digest, daily SOCMINT and OSINT insights into disinformation, misinformation, and online harms.
Today we question if there can ever be a single entity tasked with overseeing the nuances of disinformation, and it's groundhog day as monkeypox conspiracies already begin to spread online through the same pathways as Covid disinformation.
The Internet is dark and full of self-centred idiots
Quite often on a Thursday after work the PGI Intel team head to our local pub to have a beverage of choice and unwind a little. Unsurprisingly, putting 20 politics grads around a pub table can lead to some fairly heated discussion of social media, and some fairly nihilistic predictions for the imminent end of society and the world as we know it. Basically Café de Flore but with more lager and chicken wings. I’m definitely on the more pessimistic end of the scale when it comes to the future of humans and the information environment. For me, social media and the wider internet are basically mirrors which openly reflect back and magnify the worst elements of society. If someone is racist on social media, it’s because they’re racist in real life, they just have that filter removed for whatever reason. There’s something particularly irritating about witnessing idiocy online that makes it more triggering than in real life. Maybe it’s because you can’t realistically physically walk away from your phone. Or that when you close and re-open your laptop you’re immediately confronted with the same frustration in #3b5998.
However, there’s a wider problem here, which is that everyone on the internet is also a self-centred idiot. Some actively promote themselves as such – go scroll LinkedIn and read every post and I can guarantee your inner monologue will call someone an idiot within a minute. Probably less than that on Twitter, where every third post is a five-tweet thread from some startup with too few vowels in their name waxing mysticism about basic bad. Some are less proactive in their idiocy and have instead been co-opted by conspiracy networks. Behind the Curve on Netflix does a really solid job of demonstrating how conspiracy networks provide a sense of belonging and identity to their adherents. The introspective sunk cost of admitting everything you’ve espoused for years was wrong is a heavy price to pay, which is why so few conspiracists back out, with most instead doubling down into exponentially weirder and exponentially more damaging theories.
And I’m a self-centred idiot on the internet too, thinking that having spent too much time online in the past 20 years qualifies me to sit and write about emerging digital threats with any more than the bare minimum of authority. And this is another problem – so much discourse around disinformation is super patronising and written with that same sunk cost blinkeredness. Like in theory it’s great that you head a startup that’s committed to debunking disinformation, but we have no idea if debunking works or just exacerbates the problem in the long run. It’s very impressive that whatever tech org has convinced the UN that data lakes and algorithmic detection of disinformation is the way to go, but what if (hypothetically, of course) none of that actually works because disinformation and truth aren’t binary outcomes, but an ever-evolving spectrum.
If we don’t trust the social media platforms to self-regulate because they would act in self-interest, and if we don’t trust central government to become the arbiter of truth due to the inevitable self-interest, and if, much as we shouldn’t listen to corporates like HSBC or Shell about climate change, we shouldn’t blindly trust the tech startups, then who watches the watchmen?
You’re invited to the medical misinformation party
In 2022, the world is coming to terms with the COVID-19 pandemic as we've had to accept that we must live on alongside the virus. In a post-pandemic society, all of us can indeed say that we've learned a few things from the last two years - both good and bad. As an analyst who has spent a good portion of their time researching medical-related misinformation, no amount of anti-vax content, conspiracy or fake news can surprise me anymore, but the headlines on the recent Monkeypox outbreak have already triggered some familiar narratives.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned of misinformation circulating online about how monkeypox spreads. Medical advisors have said that that the disease has been labelled as a 'gay disease' by some, due to the high cases identified among men who identify as gay, bisexual or other groups - though its more linked to travel. This need to blame a minority is reminiscent to the heavy amount of anti-Asian hate at the start of COVID-19. On French Twitter, we also have started to see narratives that the Monkeypox outbreak is another virus created to control the masses; as one user posted "as long as we're scared to death - servitude obliges". Finally, of course, it's not a full medical misinformation party without vaccine conspiracies. One article states that a number of conspiracy theories say one of the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines is monkeypox, due to adenovirus vaccines containing vectors that cause common colds in chimpanzees. Of course, this has been quickly dispelled as false.
As the WHO has stated, there is no large cause for concern over this outbreak, though we can indeed start to worry about the disinformation quickly spreading online. If we have learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that the unprecedented scale of disinformation, conspiracy theories, fake news, and so on, caused as much harm as the actual virus. As such, we must use the knowledge we are now equipped with from the last two years to tackle false claims around the new outbreak before it explodes online.
More about Protection Group International's Digital Investigations
PGI’s Social Media Intelligence Analysts combine modern exploitative technology with deep human analytical expertise that covers the social media platforms themselves and the behaviours and the intents of those who use them. Our experienced analyst team have a deep understanding of how various threat groups use social media and follow a three-pronged approach focused on content, behaviour and infrastructure to assess and substantiate threat landscapes.
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